NewsR Staff
Madhya Pradesh, with maximum numbers of striped felines, has reclaimed the coveted title of India’s “tiger state”.
According to a fresh tiger census report, the erstwhile tiger state of the country has reported the presence of 526 tigers. Karnataka closely follow with 524 big cats in its count.
The National Tiger Estimation was conducted in Madhya Pradesh from December 2017 to March 2018. The central state remained on top of the list with 526 tigers. Karnataka remained second with 524 tigers while Uttarakhand remained on the third place across country with 442 tigers.
The report, released by the Union Government every four years, has put the total number of striped cats in the country at 2,967 with MP’s tally going up to 526 from 308 recorded in 2014.
The fourth cycle of National tiger status assessment of 2018-19 covered 381,400 km of forested habitats in 20 states of India. A foot survey of 522,996 km was done for carnivore signs and prey abundance estimation. In these forests, 317,958 habitat plots were sampled for vegetation, human impacts and prey dung.
Camera traps were deployed at 26,838 locations. These cameras resulted in 34,858,623 photographs of which 76,651 were of tigers and 51,777 were of leopards. The total 2 effective area sampled by camera traps was about 121,337 km. The total effort invested in the survey was over 620,795 man-days.
The report said Tigers were observed to be increasing at a rate of 6% per annum in India when consistently sampled areas were compared from 2006 to 2018.
